“It’s been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used; the sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called, ‘The Ship of Dreams’—and it was, it really was.” From the Movie: Titanic
"Owls! thought Ralph, as he clung to the Virginia creeper and filled his lungs with the cool night air that was such a relief after the stuffy drinking glass. I’ve always wanted to climb down this vine and explore the ground floor, he reminded himself grimly, and now I have to. Ralph had never before been outdoors beneath the moon and the stars. He felt small and frightened and alone."
"When I was a young girl, I lived by the water on a street called Seaside Place. At the end of my block stood an old, weather-beaten Victorian house that was said to be haunted. In it lived a crotchety, old man whose wife had died long ago. He was tall and skinny, with piercing blue eyes, and a long, white, scraggly beard that hung over his worn-out clothes. Back then, to us, he looked like he was at least 105 years old."
The Music Inside Me by fourth and fifth grade students of Marvin Elementary School in Norwalk, Connecticut
"You've sat there for fourteen years," the boomer [Eddie Sands] mused. "And during all the while you've never encountered much beyond this desk. All that interests you comes and goes across that thirty six square feet of flat surface." His eyes drifted beyond the hot, flickering flats. "You've never heard the Feather River go raving mad down there a thousand feet below the high iron. You've never listened to the big jacks snarl coming up to Arkansas Junction, where the line slips off to climb to Leadville. You don't know the smell of magnolias on a wet night down South, or the tang of the north woods when they drip with the night fog."
"Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby's first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with the pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than-life that crowds down around the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen lips clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small. While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow." (The Poisonwood Bible pg. 365)
"I was an early nuance of a realization that would take years to face. I share my life not with the girls and boys I grew up with, of the students I went to Syracuse with, or even the friends and peopld I've known since. I share my life with my rapist. He is the husband to my fate." -"Lucky" Alice Sebold
"In some sense I was, in another this was impossible. But it is later now, and I live in a world where the two truths coexist; where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand"-"Lucky" Alice Sebold
"Everything is torn, shirt, gansey, short pants, stockings, and my shoes are ready to fall off my feet entirely...My eyes are red an oozing yellow, there are matching red and yellow pimples all over my face and my front teeth are so black with rot I'll never be able to smile in my life."
"Continued yet ascending until I gained the top of an elevated rocky ridge, when appeared before me a gap or opening between other yet more lofty acents, through which continued as the rough rocky road led me, close by the winding banks of a large rapid brook, which at length turning to the left, pouring down rocky precipices, glided off through dark groves and high forests, conveying streams of fertility and pleasure to the fields below."
"With my heart rapidly accelerating and my brain aware of impending death, my saliva was drying out so rapidly that I couldn't remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth. But i did not scream out. Why? For Propriety. Inside me the fires of hell were churning and stirring; but outwardly I was as still as a Rodin."
The Pleasure Of My Company by Steve Martin (pg.44)
The three bodies hang there, even with the white sacks over their heads looking curiously stretched, like chickens strung up by the necks in s meatshop window; like birds with their wings clipped, like flightless birds, wrecked angels. -The Handmaids Tale (Pg.177) Margaret Atwood
"Above all- we were wet. Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year's Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling, on the chest." pg. 11-12 Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
"I always want to lay here. And she moves her arms up and I push my head down by her side. And i will crawl in and make room for myself. My heart can be the one that beats. And hers has stopped. Damn him to the bottom of hell damn him. What to do when the spining starts and people will come and they will want to know why and i cannott tell them why. They will not come yet no not for a while. I have her now while she sleeps bu just not breathing. I do not have to tell him so let him sit and wonder at the quiet in here, Why this house is so still and people al over everywhere are glad for the day. Guily and held down in his chair by God and fear of a sweet dead woman. You can rest with me until somebody comes to get you. We will not say anything. We can rest.
"Frannie, Frannie, Fran, He'd croon, whisper, sing. Sometimes Bobby even made me believe i was guilty of something, that i was sleeping with every doctor at the hospital, that i made him slip and bang his bad knee. That i made him beat me up, that it was me who made the fist, angled the foot, brought down a hand hard. Hard."
"he kept his hand on Hassan's back and undid his own belt buckle with his free hand. he unzipped his jeans. dropped his underwear. He positioned himself behind Hassan. Hassan didn't struggle. Didn't even whimper. He moved his head slightly and i caught a glimpse of his face. Saw the resignation in it. It was a look i had seen before. It was the look of the Lamb."
"Whippoorwills, lightning bugs, and homemade peach ice cream trigger memories of my childhood summers spent at my grandparents' house in Nashville, Tennessee...Looking at the house from a distance, I always imagined that the two side windows, the center door, and the sagging porch formed a big happy face, smiling a welcome to me when I rode my bicycle down the long front walk."
"The cell itself was a study in the Spartan, not much more than a hole in the island. There was one window high in the wall, of letterbox size. The light admitted by this portal was weak and watery, without the strength to cut through more than a few feet of shadow."
"This section of the prison had a bowed look, as if the entire wing had dropped a floor since its construction. Walls leaned in overhead, and the floor sank like a drain. Stone arches had lost their soffits or keystones and stood crookedly like the efforts of a child's building blocks. The walls were dotted with pitch patches where the water had wormed its way through the cracks. Dozens more rivulets had yet to be filled. A gurgling saltwater stream ran down the center of the collapsed floor."
"Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam." Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly, p. 1
"There were girls at the school who wanted to ride, and others who wanted to go on stage, and there was a girl who made a terrible fuss till she was allowed to learn the oboe-not the flute, not the clarinet, it had to be the oboe. They knew these things were for them; and Maia knew that boats were for her. Boats, and going on and on and not arriving unless someone wanted to." From Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson, p. 202
"It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles." from Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh p. 80
"And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude."
"The blind must rely on the feeble light of fingertips and the painful shape of a cracked shin. Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of a tapping cane, or the low, eerie flutter in one simple word -- perhaps your word -- flung down empty hallways long past midnight."
"After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago."
Jay Gatsby The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald Pg. 70
"Her indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies, whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow." Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, The New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2011.
30 comments:
“It’s been 84 years, and I can still smell the fresh paint. The china had never been used; the sheets had never been slept in. Titanic was called, ‘The Ship of Dreams’—and it was, it really was.”
From the Movie: Titanic
"Owls! thought Ralph, as he clung to the Virginia creeper and filled his lungs with the cool night air that was such a relief after the stuffy drinking glass. I’ve always wanted to climb down this vine and explore the ground floor, he reminded himself grimly, and now I have to. Ralph had never before been outdoors beneath the moon and the stars. He felt small and frightened and alone."
The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary
"When I was a young girl, I lived by the water on a street called Seaside Place. At the end of my block stood an old, weather-beaten Victorian house that was said to be haunted. In it lived a crotchety, old man whose wife had died long ago. He was tall and skinny, with piercing blue eyes, and a long, white, scraggly beard that hung over his worn-out clothes. Back then, to us, he looked like he was at least 105 years old."
The Music Inside Me by fourth and fifth grade students of Marvin Elementary School in Norwalk, Connecticut
"You've sat there for fourteen years," the boomer [Eddie Sands] mused. "And during all the while you've never encountered much beyond this desk. All that interests you comes and goes across that thirty six square feet of flat surface." His eyes drifted beyond the hot, flickering flats. "You've never heard the Feather River go raving mad down there a thousand feet below the high iron. You've never listened to the big jacks snarl coming up to Arkansas Junction, where the line slips off to climb to Leadville. You don't know the smell of magnolias on a wet night down South, or the tang of the north woods when they drip with the night fog."
Harry Bedwell, The Boomer, page 8
"Her final gulp of air as hungry as a baby's first breath. That last howling scream, exactly like the first, and then at the end a fixed, steadfast moving backward out of this world. After the howl, wide-eyed silence without breath. Her bluish face creased with the pressure closing in, the near proximity of the other-than-life that crowds down around the edges of living. Her eyes closed up tightly, and her swollen lips clamped shut. Her spine curved, and her limbs drew in more and more tightly until she seemed impossibly small. While we watched without comprehension, she moved away to where none of us wanted to follow."
(The Poisonwood Bible pg. 365)
"I was an early nuance of a realization that would take years to face. I share my life not with the girls and boys I grew up with, of the students I went to Syracuse with, or even the friends and peopld I've known since. I share my life with my rapist. He is the husband to my fate."
-"Lucky" Alice Sebold
"In some sense I was, in another this was impossible. But it is later now, and I live in a world where the two truths coexist; where both hell and hope lie in the palm of my hand"-"Lucky" Alice Sebold
"Everything is torn, shirt, gansey, short pants, stockings, and my shoes are ready to fall off my feet entirely...My eyes are red an oozing yellow, there are matching red and yellow pimples all over my face and my front teeth are so black with rot I'll never be able to smile in my life."
Page 305
Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt
"Continued yet ascending until I gained the top of an elevated rocky ridge, when appeared before me a gap or opening between other yet more lofty acents, through which continued as the rough rocky road led me, close by the winding banks of a large rapid brook, which at length turning to the left, pouring down rocky precipices, glided off through dark groves and high forests, conveying streams of fertility and pleasure to the fields below."
Page 15
Cold Mountain by Charles Fraizer
"The wind whined. A few leaves blew, scraping across the floor. The air was damp and cold. They stood silently."
Book: Timeline by Michael Crichton
Page #: 444
"Reality has become so intolerable, she said, so bleak, that all I can paint now are the colors of my dreams."
Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, page 11
"With my heart rapidly accelerating and my brain aware of impending death, my saliva was drying out so rapidly that I couldn't remove my tongue from the roof of my mouth. But i did not scream out. Why? For Propriety. Inside me the fires of hell were churning and stirring; but outwardly I was as still as a Rodin."
The Pleasure Of My Company by Steve Martin (pg.44)
I feel like cotton candy: sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.
-The Handmaids Tale(Pg.138)
Margaret Atwood
The three bodies hang there, even with the white sacks over their heads looking curiously stretched, like chickens strung up by the necks in s meatshop window; like birds with their wings clipped, like flightless birds, wrecked angels.
-The Handmaids Tale (Pg.177)
Margaret Atwood
"Above all- we were wet.
Out in the Atlantic Ocean great sheets of rain gathered to drift slowly up the River Shannon and settle forever in Limerick. The rain dampened the city from the Feast of the Circumcision to New Year's Eve. It created a cacophony of hacking coughs, bronchial rattles, asthmatic wheezes, consumptive croaks. It turned noses into fountains, lungs into bacterial sponges. It provoked cures galore; to ease the catarh you boiled onions in milk blackened with pepper; for the congested passages you made a paste of boiled flour and nettles, wrapped it in a rag, and slapped it, sizzling, on the chest." pg. 11-12
Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
"I always want to lay here. And she moves her arms up and I push my head down by her side. And i will crawl in and make room for myself. My heart can be the one that beats.
And hers has stopped.
Damn him to the bottom of hell damn him.
What to do when the spining starts and people will come and they will want to know why and i cannott tell them why. They will not come yet no not for a while. I have her now while she sleeps bu just not breathing. I do not have to tell him so let him sit and wonder at the quiet in here, Why this house is so still and people al over everywhere are glad for the day.
Guily and held down in his chair by God and fear of a sweet dead woman.
You can rest with me until somebody comes to get you. We will not say anything. We can rest.
Ellen Foster, pg. 10-11
"Frannie, Frannie, Fran, He'd croon, whisper, sing. Sometimes Bobby even made me believe i was guilty of something, that i was sleeping with every doctor at the hospital, that i made him slip and bang his bad knee. That i made him beat me up, that it was me who made the fist, angled the foot, brought down a hand hard. Hard."
"he kept his hand on Hassan's back and undid his own belt buckle with his free hand. he unzipped his jeans. dropped his underwear. He positioned himself behind Hassan. Hassan didn't struggle. Didn't even whimper. He moved his head slightly and i caught a glimpse of his face. Saw the resignation in it. It was a look i had seen before. It was the look of the Lamb."
The KIte runner, pg 75-76
"Whippoorwills, lightning bugs, and homemade peach ice cream trigger memories of my childhood summers spent at my grandparents' house in Nashville, Tennessee...Looking at the house from a distance, I always imagined that the two side windows, the center door, and the sagging porch formed a big happy face, smiling a welcome to me when I rode my bicycle down the long front walk."
Patricia C. McKissack, PORCH LIES
"The cell itself was a study in the Spartan, not much more than a hole in the island. There was one window high in the wall, of letterbox size. The light admitted by this portal was weak and watery, without the strength to cut through more than a few feet of shadow."
Eoin Colfer, Airman, p. 164
"This section of the prison had a bowed look, as if the entire wing had dropped a floor since its construction. Walls leaned in overhead, and the floor sank like a drain. Stone arches had lost their soffits or keystones and stood crookedly like the efforts of a child's building blocks. The walls were dotted with pitch patches where the water had wormed its way through the cracks. Dozens more rivulets had yet to be filled. A gurgling saltwater stream ran down the center of the collapsed floor."
Eoin Colfer, Airman, p.175
"It looked to him like the inside of a snow globe that had yet to be shaken, with everything still and white and waiting."
Northern Lights by Nora Roberts p. 10
"Locusts whir in the birches, coaxing you out of the sun and under the boughs, and the heat stills the air, heavy and sweet with the scent of balsam."
Northern Light by Jennifer Donnelly, p. 1
"There were girls at the school who wanted to ride, and others who wanted to go on stage, and there was a girl who made a terrible fuss till she was allowed to learn the oboe-not the flute, not the clarinet, it had to be the oboe. They knew these things were for them; and Maia knew that boats were for her. Boats, and going on and on and not arriving unless someone wanted to."
From Journey to the River Sea by Eva Ibbotson, p. 202
"It is an oyster, with small shells clinging to its humped back. Sprawling and uneven, it has the irregularity of something growing. It looks rather like the house of a big family, pushing out one addition after another to hold its teeming life - here a sleeping porch for the children, and there a veranda for the play-pen; here a garage for the extra car and there a shed for the bicycles." from Gift from the Sea by Anne Morrow Lindbergh p. 80
"And then I looked at the stars, and considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude."
-Charles Dickens, Great Expectations, Ch. 7
"The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed."
-Opening lines of The Gunslinger by Steven King
"The blind must rely on the feeble light of fingertips and the painful shape of a cracked shin. Echolocation comes down to the crude assessment of simple sound modulations, whether in the dull reply of a tapping cane, or the low, eerie flutter in one simple word -- perhaps your word -- flung down empty hallways long past midnight."
"House of Leaves" by Mark Z. Danielewski
"After that I lived like a young rajah in all the capitals of Europe--Paris, Venice, Rome--collecting jewels, chiefly rubies, hunting big game, painting a little, things for myself only, and trying to forget something very sad that had happened to me long ago."
Jay Gatsby
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Pg. 70
"Her indelible absence is now an organ in our bodies, whose sole function is a continuous secretion of sorrow." Aleksandar Hemon, The Aquarium, The New Yorker, June 13 & 20, 2011.
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